Linus Torvalds (torvalds.delete@this.linux-foundation.org) on September 25, 2013 5:49 pm wrote:
> Wilco (Wilco.Dijkstra.delete@this.ntlworld.com) on September 25, 2013 2:45 am wrote:
> >
> > Single threaded integer score:
>
> Wilco, geekbench has apparently replaced dhrystone as your favourite useless benchmark.
>
> Geekbench is SH*T.

As long as it's the best sh*t around we will continue to consume it.
And, AFAIK, it's not just the best, but the best by far.

>
> It actually seems to have gotten worse with version 3, which you should be aware of. On
> ARM64, that SHA1 performance is hardware-assisted. I don't know if SHA2 is too, but Aarch64
> does apparently do SHA256 in the crypto unit, so it might be fully or partially so.
>
> And on both ARM and x86, the AES numbers are similarly just about the crypto unit.
>
> So basically a quarter to a third of the "integer" workloads are just utter BS.
> They are not comparable across architectures due to the crypto units, and even
> within one architecture the numbers just don't mean much of anything.
>
> And quite frankly, it's not even just the crypto ones. Looking at the other GB3 "benchmarks",
> they are mainly small kernels: not really much different from dhrystone.
> I suspect most of them have a code footprint that basically fits in a L1I cache.
>
> Linus

For the tasks that people today find CPU limited, high L1I cache hit rate is rather typical.